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Romantic Love – a Feminist Conundrum?

By Guest Contributor on September 2, 2013

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By Renata Grossi

Romantic love has been read as a radical force capable of

breaking down entrenched social barriers. Philosophers and
sociologists have argued that the connection of love with
freedom and equality can be liberating and empowering for
women; however, this assertion has been hotly contested by
many feminists. Shulamith Firestone describes romantic love
as the pivot of oppression for women—a holocaust, a hell, and
a sacrifice. In this way, she echoes Simone de Beauvoir, who
argues that, given the unequal position of men and women,
love becomes “a curse” that confines women in the feminine
universe. As Carol Smart declares, feminists have identified
love as an aspect of “patriarchy’s ideological armament
through which women became hooked into dependent
relationships with men, entered into an unfavourable legal
Shulamith Firestone contract (namely marriage) and ultimately ended up with care
of the children.” Here, Smart addresses one of the central
underpinnings of many feminist critiques of love—love is not
itself necessarily oppressive, but it becomes so because of the social context in which it is
constructed, namely the patriarchal public and private divide.

This feminist critique of love, sex, and marriage is further developed by Eva Illouz in Why Love
Hurts: A Sociological Explanation. In the text, Illouz remains committed to love as a central idea of
modernity. she champions its egalitarian optimism and its ability to subvert patriarchy; however, she
acknowledges that love is also the source of much misery. This misery, she argues, stems from the
“institutional arrangements” surrounding it. Love is played out in “the marketplace of unequal
competing actors,” in which some people, mostly men, are able to “command a greater capacity to
define the terms in which they are loved by others.” Control is exercised by the ways in which
choice, freedom, autonomy, and commitment are manifested between men and women. Within all
of these structures, Illouz argues that there is a mismatch of goals and expectations that produces
“a set of conundrums.” For example, in relation to commitment, men are less likely to desire
marriage and family, because these are no longer sites of control and domination. Men now
measure success not according to a successful commitment but rather success on the sexual
market. As such, men wish to remain uncommitted for as long as possible. Women, on the other
hand, see the sexual market as a marriage market and are in it for a shorter period of time because
of career goals and the prevalence of the categories of sexiness and beauty, which are closely tied
to age.

While acknowledging the power of patriarchy and the division of spheres, Marilyn
Friedman considers the central problem of love to stem from its long association with the idea of
merger. In Autonomy, Gender, Politics, Friedman argues that the features of merger experienced
within romantic love are that the needs and interests of each person become entwined or pooled
together; couples feel each other’s highs and lows; there is mutual consideration and awareness;
they care for and protect each other; they can communicate with each other efficiently; couples
make joint decisions and long-term plans; there is a division of labour; they desire to be seen as

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2024/7/3 23:04 Romantic Love – a Feminist Conundrum? – The Feminist Wire
good by each other; and they want to be valued by their
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partners in a way that they value themselves. Friedman
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does not necessarily consider these features as always
already negative, but they can represent a significant
reduction in personal autonomy, and this is more dangerous
for women than for men for a number of reasons. First, she
argues that love, when examined and experienced in a
social context, “is guided by norms and stereotypes.
Foremost among these are gender norms and ideals of
romantic heterosexual love.” One such ideal, for example, is
that women should marry “up,” that a woman should marry
someone who is “taller, stronger, older, richer, smarter and
higher up on the social scale” than she is. The result of this
is that women will almost always be considered to be
Marilyn Friedman
bringing less to the relationship than the men, and it is this,
Friedman claims, that makes the romantic merger of
identities more risky for women than for men.

Additionally, in Revolutions of the Heart: Gender, Power, and the Delusions of Love, Wendy
Langford also disputes the ideology of love as positive. She argues that while the idea that love has
spread principles of justice and fairness is an attractive and optimistic view, it is empirically
unsustainable and conceptually misguided. Langford claims that while our society has come to
“venerate deliverance” through love, with promises of “liberty, equality and togetherness,” romantic
love is, in fact, a “process by which restrictions, inequality and dissatisfaction are merely obscured.”
She argues that the rhetoric that love takes us higher and allows us to develop is inaccurate. She
claims, “Love does not merely fail to give us what we desire, but in so doing, compounds painful
feelings of dissatisfaction and low self-esteem.” Its effects, then, are not positive or even neutral;
they are largely negative. While love promises happiness and freedom from social constraint, it, in
fact, delivers the opposite. Echoing Friedman, Langford points out the problem is that the success
of romantic love depends on a particular abstract individual type and model of rational behaviour
that is seldom realistic. This individual is “self-aware and operates on the basis of reason.” Hence,
this individual unrealistic, and is also more likely to resemble a man than a woman. What emerges
is the notion that love, far from being the liberating and egalitarian, is instead oppressive and
degrading to women. This critique is strengthened when we consider it alongside the feminist
critiques of sex and of marriage, two institutions that have traditionally been sources of oppression
for women.

On the other hand, some feminists theorize love as a

site of resistance, transformation, and agency. For
example, Illouz considers love to be egalitarian and
subversive. Along the same lines, in Romance
Revisited, Lynne Pearce and Jackie Stacey (similar to
Janice Radway in Reading the Romance: Women,
Patriarchy, and Popular Literature) argue that love
retains its ability to liberate women from patriarchy
because of its “narrativity.” They argue that an
engagement with the narrative of romance enables
women to facilitate the “rescripting of other areas of
life.” Additionally, Claire Langhamer, in “Love and
Courtship in Mid-Twentieth-Century England,” argues
that in everyday courtship behaviour, young women in
Janice Radway
20th century Britain have been able to act as
“architects of their own lives and as active agents of
social change.”

Furthermore, despite feminist critiques of love, few are willing to jettison it, because its connection
with individual freedom and autonomy does not make it an easy idea to reject. Love is part of who
we are, and we cannot go back to a time before its existence. As Langford argues, it is neither
possible nor desirable to return to a time when personal relationships were not experienced within
the paradigm of romantic love. “No remedy,” she argues, “is to be found in a reactive return to the
regulation of love along traditional lines. Justice and humanity cannot thrive through the imposition
of a repressive moral order and the institutionalisation of oppressive practices.” Illouz also argues
that we must not forget that historically the dominance of love has directly correlated with a decline
in men’s power over women and an increase in gender equality. The many legal changes that have

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2024/7/3 23:04 Romantic Love – a Feminist Conundrum? – The Feminist Wire
occurred regarding marriage laws have coincided with the period of history in which intimate
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relationships have been influenced by the liberalising egalitarian and radical ideology of love. This 
illustrates that romantic love can be understood in myriad ways. Love can be both liberating and
progressive. On the other hand, it can be oppressive. The conundrum for feminists, therefore, is
how to retain love’s radical, liberating, and egalitarian potential while rejecting its oppressive,
patriarchal, and reductive effects. For Illouz and Langford, the answer lies in a love that reflects
women’s experiences and desires as much as men’s, as well as a love that encompasses a more
ethical ideology.

The work of queer theorists is also important in this regard. For

example, in Love, Heterosexuality and Society, Paul Johnson
argues that love is constructed around scripts of nature and linked
to scripts of heterosexuality, marriage, procreation, and family.
This renders invisible love that exists in relationships that do not
adhere to those scripts. In “‘Instinctively, I’m not just a Sexual
Beast’: The Complexity of Intimacy among Australian Gay Men,”
Sean Slavin argues that gay men have to fight for the recognition
of the relationships they actually have. Open relationships, casual
sex with regular partners, multiple sex partners, can all, according
to Slavin, represent love. Along these lines, in The Sexual Citizen:
Queer Politics and Beyond, David Bell and Jon Binnie argue that
love must move away from the couple and include non-
monogamy, polyamory, and episodic sexuality. Johnson and other
Lauren Berlant
queer theorists, then, argue for dismantling a number of restrictive
associations that define love: the breakdown of the binary of love
and sex; the breakdown of the connection between love and nature; and the breakdown of the
connection between love and marriage, family and procreation. Similarly, in “Love (a Queer
Feeling),” Lauren Berlant argues that love is ultimately a site of optimism, change and
transformation. She writes, “Love approximates a space to which people can return, becoming as
different as they can be from themselves without being traumatically shattered; it is a scene of
optimism for change, for transformational environment.” This resembles Johnson’s claim that “whilst
romantic love may create the hell of mutual alienation, it also retains its primacy as an anti-
alienating potential, because it offers a way of expressing forms of pleasurable subjective
transformation.”

Hence, love must be understood as connected rather than disconnected to agency, as connected
with, but not subordinate, to desire, and as something that exists both within and outside of the
heterosexual scripts. Berlant argues that when queer thought enters the discourse of love, it must
not teach “that we are all alike and compelled to repeat our alikeness intelligibly, but by teaching
some of what we’ve learned about love, under the surface, across the lines, around the scenes,
informally.” Queering love, for Berlant, is achieved when it exists outside of established institutions,
when it challenges all rules connected to it that presume to establish principles for living. In other
words, when love delivers this promise, intimate relationships are free of oppressive and traditional
forms and reject established rules and barriers. This project is one that is not only relevant for the
queering of love but also relevant for the feminist rift that has long existed between it and romantic
love.

_________________________________________________________

Dr. Renata Grossi is a Fellow for the Herbert & Valmae

Freilich Foundation at Australian National University.
Her research interest is in the area of law and love. In
2011, she earned a PhD after completing her
dissertation entitled “The (In)visibility of Romantic Love
in the Legal Discourse of Modern Australian Marriage.”
She is also the author of “The Meaning of Love in the
Debate for Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Marriage in
Australia,” which was published in the International
Journal of Law in Context (2012), and she is currently
working on a book based on her dissertation. In 2013,
Renata is co-convening (with A/Prof David West) a
conference on love at the Australian National University

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2024/7/3 23:04 Romantic Love – a Feminist Conundrum? – The Feminist Wire
entitled “The Radicalism of Romantic Love: Critical Perspectives.”
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RELATED ITEMS FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF LOVE LOVE MARRIAGE PATRIARCHY QUEERY THEORY RENATTA GROSSI
ROMANTIC LOVE SEX SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

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